Nvidia confirms G-Sync displays trigger massive power consumption bug

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Nvidia’s G-Sync has been getting some press of late, thanks to a fresh crop of monitors promising new feature support and Nvidia’s push to put the technology in more boutique laptops. We’ve seen a number of displays with higher refresh rates hitting market recently, but there’s a bug in the latest driver sets and how they interface with the Asus ROG Swift PG279Q. Apparently, increasing refresh rates can cause steep increases in power consumption — and the bug doesn’t appear to be monitor-specific.

PC Perspective tracked down the problem and found it’s linked to G-Sync when running at high refresh rates. At or below 120Hz, the GPU sits comfortably at 135MHz base clock. Push the refresh rate above 120Hz, however, and power consumption begins to spike. PC Perspective believes the problem is linked to pixel refresh rates — the base 135MHz frequency isn’t fast enough to refresh a display above 120Hz, but you don’t need a GPU running full bore to handle a 144Hz refresh rate, or the 165Hz that the Asus panel can deliver.

Today, Nvidia confirmed the bug to PCPer and announced that it would have a fix in the pipeline in the near future. According to Nvidia, “That new monitor (or you) exposed a bug in the way our GPU was managing clocks for GSYNC and very high refresh rates. As a result of your findings, we are fixing the bug which will lower the operating point of our GPUs back to the same power level for other displays.”

We don’t have a G-Sync display with that high of a refresh rate to test, but we did pull an older 1080p Asus monitor out to check if the issue is confined to G-Sync. Even at 144Hz (the maximum refresh rate on this particular panel), our GTX 970 sits at a steady 135MHz. Granted, this is still a 1080p monitor, not the 2560×1440 panel that the Asus ROG Swift PG279Q uses. Nvidia’s phrasing, however, suggests that this is an issue with G-Sync and high refresh rates rather than one or the other (and the test results from PCPer appear to bear that out.

No word yet on when the driver will drop, but we expect it in the not-too-distant future. Nvidia is usually fairly quick to resolve bugs and take care of problems. If you have a high resolution, high-refresh rate display with G-Sync, you can check the issue for yourself. Just remember to let the computer sit idle at the desktop. Most modern browers use the GPU for rendering, so you’ll see power spikes if you’re actively surfing the web.

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This makes me nervous buying Nvidia products. Especially since they bump the price of their products 2x of what they’re worth.

powerwiz

AMD plant.

madwolfa

Go away.

Kwuarter

Nah I like it here.

Joel Hruska

It shouldn’t. This is a bug. It affects a tiny percentage of the monitors on the market. And it’ll be fixed soon.

davidcianorris

nVidia is a bug… bloodsucker kind… It drains your blood through your wallet.

dns7950

Are you retarded? AMD pretty much always charges just as much for a comparable card. In the rare case that they manage to beat nVidias performance at the same/lower price point, it always comes at the cost of much higher power consumption..

SonyAD

Why is a power consumption an issue? No money left over for the power bill after buying an nvidia card?

Zunalter

Interesting Fact: All of those purchases are voluntary and presumably made by consumers who are comfortable with the prices. Derp.

davidcianorris

Those are not facts… are assumptions.

Zunalter

Sure, and gravity is just a theory too.

One thing is for sure, make whatever pedantic argument you want about my claims, the one unassailable claim I made is your derpness. That is in clear evidence.

davidcianorris

Nice straw bro! keep trying, mabe some day you’ll make sense.

Zunalter

Words have meanings! (Nice spelling btw)

A straw man is where you misrepresent an argument to make it easier to “knock down”. The snarky part of my comment was directed at your obvious personal absurdity, not your argument, therefore not a straw man. The only tenuous case you could make is an ad-hominem, but since my snark was not used to evade your comment (I answered it first), it is also an invalid criticism.

Perhaps in the future you should make sure you actually know what a word means before you (sort of) use it.

Zunalter

Yea sure, perhaps the laws of the market changed overnight and now we are all forced at gunpoint to pay for GPU’s that we think are overpriced.

Ekard

so does that mean that AMD bumps the price of their products 1.75x of what they are worth?

Kwuarter

I don’t know. What does that have to do with what I said though?

Ekard

You implied price was a concern, I implied it would still be a concern even if it was AMD. The delta between price and performance is not that big between the 2 companies.

Hardware_Hoshi

Oh, AMD had cases where they almost exceeded 4-times the worth of the chip. Remember the FX-9590 once sold for 900$ and then dropped down to its real worth 230$? I have never seen anything similar to that.

If that doesn’t shed light on AMD’s fraud for high-end CPUs then I don’t know what will.

CodeDisQus

Will this affect the lifespan of the monitor in anyway.

Joel Hruska

No. This is a temporary GPU issue, not a monitor issue.

Winston Smith

Hardly temporary, I’ve had this issue for a couple of years now.

Joel Hruska

That’s exceedingly unlikely. It appears to affect only G-Sync monitors above 120Hz. Early G-Sync panels were limited to 60Hz.

Winston Smith

I run a dual QX2710 Korean monitor setup with 120Hz refresh on both, it affects me.

Joel Hruska

Those aren’t G-Sync monitors. So no, it doesn’t.

e92m3

It probably does though…

Go on the NVidia forums and look for yourself, the issue is *not* limited to gsync and unless NVidia actively ignores their own forum, they KNOW it isn’t the root of the problem.
You should know better than to take NVidia at their word by now. I have to question your credibility when you actively decide that a commenter ‘doesn’t have this problem’ when you’ve clearly have not done any research of your own. I appreciate the fact that you ran a test, but it’s incomplete and not applicable, likely insufficient in terms of pixel clock requirement. A bit of reading would have already told you this and saved you effort.

Also, ‘quick to fix issues’? Again, go look at the NVidia forums. Their windows 10 drivers are riddled with critical bugs. The power-state oddity alone has been observed for over 2 years now in various configurations (multi-monitor being one of them), along with input latency to the accessory displays.

The gsync bug is new. Do not confuse the new bug with the pre-existing long-term ‘bug’, because the old ‘bug’ is where the discussion needs to be focused.

Joel Hruska

“You should know better than to take NVidia at their word by now. ”

I didn’t take their word. I pulled a 144Hz monitor off the shelf and tested it. I saw no issue, no ramp in power consumption. That held true for the G-Sync 60Hz display I happened to have hooked up as well.

Leon Wolfeson

So you’re a hypocrite, where’s your British made monitors?

Winston Smith

You’re a complete weirdo

Leon Wolfeson

No, I’m not like you. You can’t deny your hypocrisy, though.

edit; Speelung. Oops.

Winston Smith

It’s spelt hypocrisy

Leon Wolfeson

Ah yes, darn voice type, where did it…gah lol. Point stands.

Winston Smith

Creeping through people’s comments and carpetbombing them with rambling nonsense is the behaviour of an oddball.

Leon Wolfeson

Yes, thanks for talking about your behavior. You spew the same crap regardless of where you post, it’s clear.

Winston Smith

Get a life.

Leon Wolfeson

I have one, and don’t need to steal others, not being capitalist.
But hey.

You keep spewing the same insults everywhere, of course.

Winston Smith

You are hateful, bigoted, prejudiced, small-minded, and possibly sick in the head. Have a great day.

Leon Wolfeson

“Goodbye”

Ah, lasted 5 minutes, before you came back to prove you are a liar, for the record.

I’m not like you, but thanks for your spewing hate frantically at me. For telling the truth, no less.

First Nvidia gpu melting/frying themselves due to faulty drivers and now a power consuming bug also probably due to faulty drivers. I think AMD had an instance similar to this not long ago but I forgot what it was.

Joel Hruska

Keep in mind that this bug does not load the GPU beyond safe limits or exceed its own thermal capabilities. Power consumption goes up because the GPU pixel clock rises to maximum, but other areas of the card are not being stressed at the same time or in the same way.

El_Capitan

Maybe they should test it with a GTX 980 or GTX 780, and not the GTX 970? Who but NVIDIA knows if for some reason G-Sync is accessing the card’s 0.5GB memory segment on the GTX 970, and maybe that’s the problem?

Matthew Wolstenholme

can confirm it does the same thing on sli 980s

Winston Smith

I thought this was just me..!!!!

I run a dual QX2710 Korean monitor setup with 120Hz refresh on both… When I run at 120hz on the desktop my GTX 970 is running full bore at 1135-1451 Mhz like I’m running Far Cry 4 or something… The only way to push this down is to use an obscure setting in nVidia Inspector to force it back to normal speeds. Very annoying!!!!!

e92m3

That’s because the problem is not and never was limited to gsync. It existed in some form before gsync was even released.
This is just NVidia talking nonsense for their PR campaign to their usual marketing mouthpieces.
According to some rough calculations, the hardware may not have sufficient pixel clocks for multi-monitor/high-resolution/high refresh at idle power states, meaning an architectural change may be necessary for this ‘bug’ to actually be fully resolved for all configurations.
The particular behavior they are talking about with gsync is a new bug that can be fixed. You’re dealing with the old ‘bug’ that may in fact simply be the hardware working ‘as designed’.
Pay close attention for any odd behavior when you’re manually pushing the clocks down driver to driver, as that would indicate the clocks have been chosen for a reason and not by accident.

Since you’re running 2710s, you’re familiar with pixel clocks. Would be interesting to see what clock exactly pushes the c-state up. If this is a hardware limitation, I suspect the pixel clock isn’t that far out of range and switching to the low 3d power state is overkill. An intermediate power state to supply specified pixel clocks seems like a decent solution, though it’s not really possible to add such functionality through drivers alone afaik.

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